Clark's Field Part 33

The judge was indefatigable in his determination to penetrate to every dreary corner, every noisome alley of the place, although the young stranger seemed to think that he had had enough at the first glance. It is not necessary for us to make the rounds of the Field for the third time with the little party. Adelle, who had a greater interest than her cousin because of her dim understanding of the judge's purpose, gazed searchingly at everything, and was able to see it differently, to comprehend it all as she had not been able to the time before when she had forced Archie to make the expedition with her. She realized now, at least in part, what Clark's Field really meant, what the magic lamp she had so carelessly rubbed for years to gratify her desires was made of.

And it made her thoughtful.

About noon, when the little streets were flooded from curb to curb by a motley army of pale-faced foreign workers from the high lofts and the noisy factories, the judge's carriage drew up beside a vacant corner, the one large undeveloped bit of land still left, nearly in the center of the whole tract. This was plastered with the signs of the realty company, seductively offering to lease it for a term of years or improve it with a building to suit tenant, etc.

"About all the open s.p.a.ce and blue sky there is left!" the judge remarked, pointing out the figures of a few dirty children who were exploring a puddle and a pit of rubbish in the vacant lot. (These, I suppose, were the descendants of that brave body of little hoodlums of which I and my brothers were members years ago, and the puddle and pit were all that was left of our mysterious playground!)

"There's a heap of cheap foreign rubbish all around here," the mason growled, spitting contemptuously into the roadbed, as if he resented that human beings could be found forlorn enough, low enough, to labor under such conditions. "Not one of 'em looks as if he had had enough to eat or knew what a good wash was or what the earth smells like!"

No, the Coast for him, and the sooner the better, too!

The judge smiled tolerantly, observing,--

"I don't suppose they have much chance to bathe here. The city cannot afford to put up public baths and employers rarely think of those things."

"Look at the rotten stuff they eat!" The mason pointed disdainfully to the tipcarts drawn up along the curb, where men and women were chaffering over dried fish and forlorn vegetables that would have soured the soul of old Adams, who once raised celery on this very spot. "Don't the folks in these parts eat better than that?"

"Not generally," the judge replied. "We have no public market in this city, and it is very difficult for the poorer sort to get fresh food."

"You'd oughter see the California markets!" the young man bragged.

"Tell me about them," the judge said.

And while the young mason expatiated on his land of plenty where the poor man could still enjoy his own bit of G.o.d's sunlight and fresh fruit and flowers from the earth, Adelle watched the thick stream of workers in Clark's Field, pushing and dawdling along the narrow street. There were girls with bare arms and soiled shirt-waists and black skirts, there were lean, pale boys, and women old before their time, hurrying from tenement to shop, their hearts divided between the two cares of home and livelihood. Adelle recalled one of her first talks with the stone mason, in which he had crudely told her that her yearly income represented the total wages of four or five hundred able-bodied men and women, such as these, who worked from ten to sixteen hours a day for three hundred days each year, when they could, and all told earned hardly what she drew by signing her name to slips of paper as income from her property during the same s.p.a.ce of time. He said to her,--"You can think that you are worth about four hundred human lives! Who talks about slavery being abolished? h.e.l.l!" She had thought then that his way of putting it was quite wrong, unjust: she was sure that Major Pound could easily have disposed of his contention. Indeed, she had heard the major and men like him maintain that capitalists like herself were the only true benefactors of humanity, that without them the working-people could never be fed! But to-day she was not sure that her cousin had been wrong. She saw a concrete proof of his statement in this stream of poorly nourished, hard-worked men, women, boys, and girls, all toiling to maintain themselves and pay her the interest upon the crowded land of Clark's Field. In a very definite sense they were all working for her; they were her slaves!

The younger women and girls looked into the judge's brougham curiously or impudently, attracted by the spectacle of leisure and quiet richness that Adelle presented, a sight not commonly afforded them in the streets of Clark's Field and always fascinating to women of any cla.s.s wherever it may be. Adelle's dress was plain black, and she had shed much of her jewelry; but beneath her simple gown and fine linen and carefully cherished skin she began to feel a new sensation, not exactly pity for these less lucky sisters, rather wonder that it should all be so, that she should be sitting there in idleness and comfort and they should be tramping the pavement of Clark's Field to the factory....

When she saw the boys playing in the mud puddle in the one vacant lot, she thought of her own little boy, on whom she had lavished every care, every luxury. So with these working-girls, she thought how easily she might have been one of them going from the rooming-house in Church Street to shop or factory, as many women of better Puritan families than hers had done. It was pure accident, she could see, why she and her child had been saved from such a lot--due neither to her own ability nor that of any of her Clark forbears! It was a humbling perception.

"h.e.l.l!" her cousin was saying explosively, "these people are no better 'n cattle. At least they ought to give 'em a trough to wash in and a place where they could buy decent food."

"A few other things, too, perhaps," the judge added with his gentle smile. "But who will do it? The city is already badly debt-ridden. The owners of the land pay so much in taxes and interest, due to the high price of the land here, that they probably make a bare eight per cent net on their investment."

He looked inquiringly at the young man.

"It's all wrong," the mason retorted heatedly, forgetting that he had hoped to become one of these "owners of the land," and returning to his incipient rebellion at the state of society in which he lived. "Somebody ought to be made to do such things."

The judge smiled finely, merely remarking in a casual tone,--

"It is a very perplexing question, all that, my young friend!"

"But you don't think it's right so," the mason persisted belligerently, thinking to challenge a supporter of things as they are.

"There's very little that is quite right in this world, my boy," the judge replied simply.

"Well, we'd better set out now to make it nearer right," the young man grumbled.

"Oh, yes, that is perfectly sound doctrine.... And shall we begin with Clark's Field?" he asked, turning to Adelle with one of his playful, kindly smiles.

"It needs it," she said simply.

"Yes, I think it needs it!"

"Sure!" the mason a.s.serted resoundingly.

A little while afterwards the judge said to the driver,--

"I think that we will go home now, John."

XLIX

In these last moments something had happened to Adelle. While the judge and her cousin had been talking, she had been watching the stream of humanity flow past her, not hearing what the two were saying, listening to the voice of her own soul. It is difficult to describe in exact words the nature of Adelle's mental life. Ideas never came to her in orderly succession. They were not evolved out of other ideas, nor gathered up from obvious sources and repeated by her brain, parrotlike, as with so many of us. They came to her slowly from some reservoir of her being, came painfully, strugglingly, and often were accompanied to their birth by an inner glow of emotional illumination like the present when she saw herself and her child living the life of Clark's Field. But after they had struggled into birth, they became eternal possessions of her consciousness, never to be forgotten, or debated, or denied. She had thus slowly and painfully achieved whatever personality she had since she came for the first time a pale child into Judge Orcutt's court. If any one had talked to her about the "obligations of wealth," "social service," or "love of humanity," she would have listened with a vacant stare and replied like a child of ten. The judge seemed to know that.

It was only by idleness and Archie and unhappiness and the fire and the tragic death of her child that she had come to realize that there were other people in the world besides herself and the few who were a necessary part of herself, and that these other lives were of importance to themselves and might be almost as important to her as her own. It had taken Adelle a good many years of foolish living and reckless use of her magic lamp to get this simple understanding of life. But she was not yet twenty-six, really at the start of life. If already she had come so far along the road, what might she not reach by fifty? In such matters it is the destination alone that counts....

Just now, as has been said, a greater illumination had come over her spirit than was ever there before, although for the life of her Adelle could not have expressed in words what she felt, or at this time put her new thought into concrete acts. But with Adelle acts had never been wanting when the time for them came, and her slow mind had absorbed all the necessary ideas. The judge recognized the illumination in the young woman at his side. For the first time in her life, perhaps, at least for one of the rare moments of it, her face was in no sense vacant. The wide gray eyes that looked forth upon the sordid world of Clark's Field were seeing eyes, though they did not see merely physical facts. Instead of their usual blankness or pa.s.sive intelligence, they had a quality in them now of dream. And this gave Adelle's pale face a certain rare loveliness that in human faces does not depend upon color or line or emotional vivacity. It is rather the still radiance of the inner spirit, penetrating in some inexplicable manner the physical envelope and creating a beauty far more enduring, more compelling to those who perceive it, than any other form of beauty intelligible to human eyes.

The judge perceived it. As the carriage slowly retraced its way through the crowded streets of Clark's Field, he silently took the young woman's hand and held it within his own, smiling gently before him as one who understood what was too complex to put in words. He was an old man now, and it was permitted him to express thus the compulsion of Adelle's rare loveliness, thus to confide to her the sympathy of his own dreaming heart. The little ungloved hand lay within his old hand, warm and pa.s.sive, not clinging, content to rest there in peace.

Thus they jogged back to the city, all three silent, occupied with personal thoughts suggested by their expedition this fine May morning into Clark's Field, which the judge for one felt had been thoroughly successful.

Judge Orcutt kept the two cousins to luncheon, and when Adelle had gone with his housekeeper to lay aside her hat and wraps, he was left alone with the young stone mason. After long years of watching human beings from the bench, the judge formed his opinions of people rapidly and was rarely mistaken upon the essential quality of any one. He liked Tom Clark. He did not mind, as much as Adelle did, his spitting habit, for he remembered the time not more than a generation or two ago when the best American gentlemen chewed tobacco or took snuff, and he could see quality in a person who spat upon the ground, but did not conceal ugly and vile thoughts, or who abused the language of books in favor of that more enduring vernacular of the street, or who confused the table implements, or did the hundred and one other little things that are supposedly the indelible marks of an inferior culture. A most fastidious person himself, as was obvious, he looked in others for a fastidiousness of spirit rather than for a correct performance of the whims of refinement. For the one, as everybody knows but forgets, is eternal, and the other is merely transitory--the most transitory aspect of human beings, their manners. He was pleased with Tom Clark's vigorous reaction against the East in favor of his own freer land, his disgust with the incipient squalor of Clark's Field, and his honest scorn for a civilization that would permit human beings to live as they lived there and generally in the more crowded industrial centers of the world. What the stone mason had recklessly vaunted to Adelle as "anarchism," the judge recognized as a healthy reaction against unworthy human inst.i.tutions,--the idiom in him of youth and hope and will. And he could understand, now that he was face to face with the vigorous young man, the reason why Adelle had been drawn to the stone mason from that first time when she had discharged him from her employ. For he had those qualities of vitality, expression, initiative that the younger branch of the Clarks had exhausted. The Edward S. Clarks, transplanted fifty years and more ago to new soil, may not have risen far in the human scale in their new environment, but they had renewed there, at least in the person of this young stone mason, their capacity for health and vigor.

Once more they had strong desires, will, and the courage to revolt against the settled, the safe, the formal, and the proper. Of course, this Clark was an anarchist! All strong blood must create some such anarchists, if there is to be progress in this world.

It did not seem so preposterous to the judge, after these few hours of contact with the mason, that Adelle should want to endow her cousin with a part of that fortune which but for accident and legal formality would have been his. There were, however, many other of these California Clarks, in whom Adelle could not possibly be interested and who might not be equally promising, but who would have to share her liberality with the mason. It was a delicate tangle, as the judge realized when he attempted to untie the knot.

"Mr. Clark," he began, sinking into the deep wing chair before his fireplace, "I suppose your cousin has informed you of the results of her interview with the Washington Trust Company?"

"Yes!" the young man emitted shortly, with an inquiring grin. "She said there was nothing doing about our claim."

"The officers of the trust company were right so far as the law is concerned, as I had to tell Mrs. Clark. The law is doubtless often slow and bungling in its processes, but when it has once fully decided an issue it is very loath to open it up again, especially when, as in this case, litigation would involve hardship and injustice to a great many innocent people."

"Well, I somehow thought it might be too late," the young mason remarked, throwing himself loosely into the chair opposite the judge.

After a moment of reflection he added feelingly,--"The law is an infernal contraption anyhow--it's always rigged so's the little feller gets left."

"The law rigged it so that your cousin, who was a penniless girl, got a thousand times more than her grandfather asked for his property," the judge observed with a twinkle.

"She had the luck, that's all--and we other Clarks didn't!" the young man replied.

"You can call it luck, if you like," the judge mused.

"That's what most folks would call it, I guess."

"I suppose that is what she feels, because she was anxious when she came to see me yesterday to divide her fortune with you other Clarks."